Remember Jeb Bush? You know, he was the guy, with the... thing? And our dear friend Martin O’ Malley! He held an event in Iowa in a blizzard. One guy showed up ― and he wasn’t really feeling it, as it turned out.
So much has happened since we launched First To Last in January 2015. American politics as we understood it seems to have fallen apart. Jeb Bush folded like a Hoberman sphere; Donald Trump stepped out from a puff of brimstone to sell America a monorail. Hillary Clinton, like The Dude in “The Big Lebowski,” abides.
We’ve seen Bernie Sanders ― who maybe didn’t think he was going to be in this race too long ― hang on through the entire primary, and influence the Democratic Party. We learned, the hard way, that winners don’t finish third. (Sorry, Marco Rubio.) And somehow, Wikileaks has gone from plumbing the secrets of the Deep State to being as obsessed with dumb campaign minutiae and horse-race politics as the establishment media it rebelled against. Who knew Julian Assange was destined to become Woke Mark Halperin? Seems a disappointment.
Seriously, what have we learned? Here are our Dirty Dozen takeaways. No time to be clever, people, the apocalypse is nigh. (Hey, that’s also Trump’s pitch to America!)